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Dr Viola Mendonca and Dr Emma Smith look at the effectiveness of medical students in recognising cardiac arrest, initiating chest compressions, and delivering defibrillation.

The annual incidence of in-hospital cardiac arrest is 1 to 1.5 per 1,000 hospital admissions, and return of spontaneous circulation is achieved in 53% of those who are treated by a hospital’s resuscitation team.

The hospital resuscitation team must, at a minimum, be able to perform basic airway interventions, including the use of a supraglottic airway in adults, intravenous cannulation, intraosseous access, defibrillation, and drug administration. They also should be able to provide immediate post-resuscitation care. In some hospitals, the cardiac-arrest team may not include an anaesthetist, but advanced airway skills such as tracheal intubation should be accessible when needed.

Authors: 

• Dr Duncan Kemp, Anaesthetic Registrar and co-creator of the NovPod
• Dr Eoin Dore, Anaesthetic Registrar and co-creator of the NovPod

This month marks a year of hard work coming to fruition since we launched the podcast ‘NovPod: A beginner’s guide to anaesthetics’. With more than 25,000 ‘listens’ in the first three months, it feels like we’ve created a practical, useful podcast that has been well-received.  So to celebrate, we’d like to take you behind the scenes to talk through how we developed the NovPod and discuss some lessons learnt along the way.

From the beginning: why did we do it?

After creating a one-off podcast for a Difficult Airway Society multimedia competition, we wanted to build on this. Our plans coincided with the renovation of the RCoA novice curriculum and so our target audience became obvious – novice anaesthetists. We reflected on our own experiences and set out to share some of the best advice we received as novices. This wasn’t from textbooks or courses, but rather the voices of the friendly registrars and SHOs who would take us aside and tell us how anaesthetics worked in practice – giving us advice and survival tips to help us grow and develop.

Author: Dr Stuart Connal, Specialty Registrar in Anaesthesia, North Central London Deanery

Perioperative Journal Watch is written by TRIPOM (trainees with an interest in perioperative medicine – tripom.org) and is a brief distillation of recent important papers and articles on perioperative medicine from across the spectrum of medical publications.

Dyslexia is not just a learning difficulty affecting reading and writing; it can be related to difficulty processing and remembering information such as phonological processing, rapid naming, working memory, processing speed, and the autonomic development of skills.¹ 

Up to 10% of the population is estimated to have dyslexia. The newer term ‘neurodivergent’ is postulated to be the wider term, encompassing having cognitive functioning different from what is seen as ‘normal’,² and it includes dyslexia.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is the latest iteration freely available on the internet. Trained using transformer architecture, it generates human-like text by sifting through terabytes of data and billions of written works from internet sources¹ – many from familiar authors – to create human-like answers to prompts or questions.

As an experiment, I prompted ChatGPT to write this article, and it produced a not-terrible piece of work – although Reader, you will be reassured to know that this publication is man-made.

For your enjoyment, here is an example of a prompt related to anaesthesia:

On 27 August 2011, The Times alerted readers to a craze originating in Spain: a drink high in alcohol was vaporised in a hand-held inhaler that contained a heater and a supply of oxygen. 

The alcohol rapidly reached the bloodstream via the lungs, quickly producing intoxication. A local newspaper reported:‘Oxy shots – the latest madness of the British in Majorca’. One of us (AD) recounted the story to an anaesthetist friend, Keith Pooley, who announced that once in his career he had actually anaesthetised a patient with ethyl alcohol vapour. He told me the full story which I later wrote up in The Times as an addendum to the oxy shots’ article. He was visiting a local cottage hospital on a weekly basis to prepare patients for minor surgery, mainly using halothane. On this occasion the induction was slow, with the patient resisting, spluttering and coughing. ‘But’ said Keith ‘I eventually got him down and he had his operation’. Recovery was atypical of that from halothane, and some detective work was called for. Keith unscrewed the vaporiser bottle and sniffed the contents – surgical spirits (typically 70–99% ethyl alcohol). It seems that the previous week he had discarded an empty 250 ml bottle of halothane. Someone else, keen on recycling, later retrieved the bottle from the bin and used it to store the surgical spirits. Unlabelled, it had wandered around the hospital until eventually finding its way back into the anaesthetics’ cupboard….